The most challenging new skill we’ve had to tackle as bloggers is photography.  There’s not much more frustrating than blogging about a project that looks beautiful in person, but might as well be cat barf in the photos.  And poorly lit cat barf at that.  Our quest to take effective, lovely photos is ongoing – this blog serves as a thorough and sometimes mortifying record of our efforts – and we often seek out inspiration and instruction in images taken by others.

Jonas Ingerstedt is a Swedish photographer and an absolute idol of ours.  His exquisite interior photography is featured in international magazines, including Elle Decor, and many of our favorite images are his.  While the trend in the blog world is toward hyper-bright overexposed spaces – images that at the extreme necessitate sunglasses and eradicate detail – Ingerstedt’s photos are luminous but soft, with a quality of light that makes the rooms he’s shooting somehow seem both magical and real.

Getting colors to read true in images is a struggle, but he captures them beautifully, making them look rich and saturated, but not overwrought.

We’ve learned a lot by studying how he frames a shot – how he surrounds his focal point with just a glimpse of the surrounding furniture, providing context and enabling our eye to extrapolate the blissful whole.

He also uses a home’s architecture to highlight a space, inviting us to walk in and look more closely:

The angle from which he shoots vignettes makes it feel like you could reach your hand out to touch the spines of books, or as if you’ve just opened a drawer and are looking down into its colorful contents.

His work is gorgeous, right? Do you have a favorite? We hope you had a fantastic weekend and we’ll be back on Wednesday!